#touch type tool

[pathfinderwizard]

Discover: Illustrator’s Touch Type Tool

The Touch-Type Tool, introduced into the Illustrator Toolset in 2013, is an intuitive way to adjust the scaling, position and rotation of individual characters in text, saving you from expanding the text to outlines or messing about for ages in…

Touch Type Tool essentially lets you fine tune lettering without creating outlines!

[wmatthewsutton]

Turning a Picture into a Graphic

I wanted to turn a photograph I had taken of my friend into something more graphic that would show his personality more.

Below is the original picture I started off with...

I started off by removing the background in photoshop using the background eraser tool.  In order to best do this, it is good to put a bright colored layer underneath, so that it is easy to see as you are removing the background on the picture.

Then, when you click the little box (with the eye) to the left of the layer, it will remove the background, and the background will then be transparent.

I then completely removed the background and saved a version that could be used for anything really.

Then, I decided to put the red background back on the photo to give it some extra color.

From there, I decided to add his name...

But I still felt like the image could use something more, so I took a moment to think about this person's personality and interests.  He is really into fashion and loves fashion models, so I had to think about how I could project that onto this image without taking away from his photo too much.  Then, I thought of the RuPaul song, "Supermodel" and decided to pick a verse of it to fill the blank space on the left of his image, and used some simple white lines to give the effect of spotlights.  

In order to have full control over the text, I imported the photoshop image into Adobe Illustrator, pasted the text, and then used the Touch Type Tool (a feature that is new to Adobe Illustrator) to stretch and move the individual letters of the text around to conform to the his image.

Finally, the last thing I did was change some of the words to a dark red to make the words pop out more (it makes the white and red words pop more because of the contrast).  The reason I picked the dark red is because a dark color red works really well on a light color red (almost like an engraving feature) and this is the case with any color (i.e. navy on light blue, etc.)

Overall, I think the graphic came out very nice, and was relatively simple to create.